As most of you who read my stuff on a more regular basis might know, I enjoy joining the occasional Bomber Bar fleet. Not only because of the fact that it gives me something to do, but also because I just love stealthy ops. I adore my bombers.

Yesterday, we (corp mate and I) didn’t have much action in our womrhole so we decided to join a Bomber’s Bar Wolf Pack operation. We met up a few jumps from Jita, and waited for a staging system in which we’d basically be doing a few bombing runs etc.

This system was 93PI-4, also known as Goonswarm Territory. We got a cyno bridge into it from high-sec and got started on getting ping spots etc.
I personally have nothing against the guys, but a lot of people have a “Grrr Goons” mentality that seems to fuel quite a bit of story on their part, which is nice.
Every game needs their “bad guys”, I for one don’t really care, as long as I can throw a bomb or two I’m happy.

The evening started of fairly well, we got our bombing pings, waited for an opportunity, and were given one when someone in the fleet sacrificed himself to get us kills.

De-cloaking when your squadron is called and firing your bomb along with 8 others is quite a sight. I was a bit entranced by it and instead of warping off immediately I stuck around a bit to see them blow up before warping off to a celestial and bouncing back.

Those first few waves gave us a few kills and became the start of an evening of staying around a gate, killing stragglers and getting a response fleet on our asses.

We were camping the gate, having a bubble on it. Killing people that got stuck in it. And one little Goon was quite persistent in trying to get to the next system. Coming back over and over again in her pod.
It was quite amusing to see a bunch of us de-cloak to kill the pod every single time. “The little Goon that tried” we actually voted on letting her through after the fourth time because, if you really want it that bad, we shouldn’t stop that.

After a while we heard that one of our hunters got us something, and we dropped on a Chimera, which was obviously bait. But no worries there, we got out safely after a few shots and started to go back to the staging system.

Turns out that us being gone for a while, gave them the perfect opportunity to muster a response fleet and get on the in gate. Meaning that half our fleet jumped into the staging system only to see a LOT of goons warping in on the gate. Most of them got out safely, and those of us on the other side waited for a cyno to be lit so we didn’t have to use the gate. Once we had eyes on the correct side again we decided to wait a bit longer and try for another few kills. Turns out that’s what they were waiting on, because the moment we de-cloaked, we had a Titan and a bunch of carriers on our asses. They brought in a Ragnarok.

Close enough to almost touch it

It was a bit overkill but this was only the second time I’ve seen a Titan up close, and it was the first time in response to a fleet that I was in. So I was a bit proud of myself there. Despite it being mostly because of how well the BB FC did his job, but still.

Despite their camp on the gate we did still get a Vagabond, Cynabal and a bait Sigil.

So all in all it was a good night, I got kills and made it out alive, docking back up in Jita with a smile on my face.

NPSI, the abbreviation for “Not Purple, Shoot It”. A mindset that communities such as Bombers Bar/Spectre Fleet use, you join a fleet of likeminded people and just shoot at whatever’s not in fleet, both allies and enemies alike.

I’ve joined in a few Bombers Bar roams now, and as those of you who’ve read my previous blog posts know, I love joining them. Not only do I get a bit more experience shooting things, I also do more than just spin my ship because of it.

The past few hours of my Saturday evening were spent in a fleet set up by the Bombers Bar and WTM community. When I joined we were told that we’d go and try to get a few carrier kills and afterwards have a ‘Free for all’ with the people in bombers/cloakies that wanted to.

Previous Bombers Bar fleets, the amount of people joining was usually around 50 to 60. Today there were 145 people in Bombers, ready to shoot.

Let’s just say that it was fun, despite the traffic control.

During the fleet there were a few giveaways, one of which was a bomber for the person with the best cat.gif picture linked. The guys judging the pictures had a lot of work to do, about 100 people posting gifs is a lot of links to click.

Once a carrier was spotted the next giveaway got announced, the first people to get point on it (other than the hunters) would be getting a few goodies.Not only are the people who take care of the fleets giving us nice kills, they were also going to be giving us ships, and other goodies for doing things in the fleet.

We killed an Archon, there were 108 pilots involved in the kill, the amount of torpedoes shot was such a pretty sight.

“Look at them go”

After the Archon kill we waited a bit, changed region and waited for another target.

“Ready to jump oh captain my captain”

We got another cyno & bridge a bit later, but unfortunately, due to so many people jumping at one, traffic control decided to not let us through immediately so the target was able to escape.

“Follow the leader, he’ll be your bridge for today”

After this the fleet was going to stand down due to the fact that our Jump Fatigue timer was getting a bit too high, those who wanted to kill their team mates, were told to get ready for a little Free for All.

Instead of NPSI, the new rule was going to be NCSI (Not Cloaked, Shoot It). Every purple on grid was a target.

I didn’t last until the end, but I got my first last hit on a bomber with a bomb during the FFA. So next to the Archon kill, I’d call that an OP success.

“Tengu on grid? Kill it!”

My Bomber alt is slowly starting to get an extremely nice Killboard, and I’m pretty certain that I’ll be getting a whole lot more kills by joining them.

Content creation at its best.

Those of you who haven’t tried it yet, I can do nothing else than tell you to try and join the Bombers Bar channel in game. There’s fleets almost every night and they’re definitely worth joining. They even set up a Reddit, Facebook and Twitter account. Check it out.

Sunday was a better day for me than Saturday. There was a call for bombers and after dusting off my Nemesis I joined the fleet. After waiting for a while we had about 25 bombers ready to go, all of us with scorch bombs.

“Okay, let’s do this!”

We got bridged about 62 jumps from our starting point, in order to get perched around a POS. I couldn’t help but tip my hat towards the FC for making two perches for each squad. Each perch giving another angle of attack.

“Sitting here, waiting, anticipating”

According to intel there was a fleet was going to come into the system soon..Ish.. So we waited for their cyno to light up, ready to shower them with fire, just to show our appreciation.

It took a while but they eventually got there, which meant that the party could start for us. We did a warp bombing run. Something I have never done before (but hey that’s not saying much).

“Incoming!”

What this means is that we aligned to the target, and then we got a squad warp about 30km off, when landing you de-cloak and drop your bomb, after which you get the hell out of there.

It was fun, on the first run I killed an Eos and got a few extra kills on my board. But the second run they were prepared. A Sabre bubbled up and silly me had an afterburner instead of MWD, so I got killed rather quickly.

But it was enjoyable and that’s what mattered. We all brought bombs for 4 runs, so 2 more to go. I saw a few other kills and some of the other bombers dying. But in the end, operation success.

“I hope I survive this!”

I warped to one of the stations and then noticed a few other ships for sale in another one of the stations. I should have known better than to warp there, but I didn’t.

So I lost a capsule and an Impairor, no big deal, it was an instant ride home and I could grab some coffee while figuring out what to do next.

What I was going to do next involved going to Jita on my industry and buying a few implants. I have a bunch of jump clones around, but wasn’t using any of them. I was flying in an empty clone because I live in Null. And getting podded is just a silly way to lose ISK.

So I bought +4’s, jumped into another empty clone and am currently parked in that one. I’ll be jumping back and forth from that one on days when I go out in Null. That’s mostly on the weekend so I can jump to him on a Friday and jump back on Sunday.

My other implant clones were sporting +3’s but that 1 extra gives a little more oomph. Implants are handy to get a little bit of extra training done, so I’m going to use that. Should have thought about that 2 months ago.

A few days ago I came online at the right moment. The alliance was going to go out in Stealth Bombers, looking for targets.

I’m a big fan of bombers despite the fact that I only have a little experience with them. But still, this would be a great time to get some more of it.

On top of that, we’d be using a Sin along with the bombers to make use of the short range jumping technologies so that we wouldn’t have to do it ourselves. When I heard that I couldn’t help but get even more eager about this, I had never bridged before so that’d be another first for me. The night was on to a good start.

“What now? We wait? Oh..Well okay.”

Cue the waiting. Because of the fact that we weren’t going to be roaming ourselves, we had scouts out that were checking for targets for us, I didn’t mind, that gave me some more time to check my fit and make sure that I put the bomb away. We were only going to be using torpedoes anyway.

After jumping into a Purifier instead of my Nemesis I joined the rest of the 15 or so bombers and waited until a target was found.

“Pretty colours”

At around this time I learned that I really should pay more attention to what is being said to me in Teamspeak or even Fleet chat. As I never used a bridge before, I had no idea what I had to do. I figured that if it was lit, I’d jump automatically. I was wrong.

“Wait, what’s going on, why am I not jumping too?!”

I saw everyone around me jump, and I just hung there in space, looking around me trying to figure out what just happened. Turns out I need to right click the Black Ops ship and press jump. Oh well, lesson learned, time to wait again.

After a while we heard our scout go “Oh shit, oh shit, fuck fuck, get over here!” So I bet you guys can figure out what happened, there was a target, and the scout only noticed when he was right on top of them, or shall we say the other way around.

We jumped, got bubbled and started calling targets and shooting. They knew we were around and had prepared accordingly. I followed the Fleet Commander’s calls as I burned out of the bubble, right as I got out a, few more ships got called in and we were told to warp away if we could.

I just sat there with a smile on my face as I warped towards one of the moons and cloaked up. It was the third time in a few days that I went out for some PvP and got myself a few kills extra on my killboard. According to what was said on TS we did lose the ISK battle, but it’s not like I cared about that, I was PvP’ing, and I was enjoying myself a lot.

“Time to go”

As far as my ISK making goes, I’m still manufacturing, and for some reason making more ISK than a few weeks ago. Which makes no sense because I’m doing less work than I did before. If I had more time I would be trying to figure out how this is happening. But right now I’ll just shrug and be happy with it.

And on a final note. I’ve been accepted on the Fansite list on the EvE Online site. Yay! I doubt I’ll get more people coming over to read my stuff, but it’s nice to know that the people at CCP think I’m worthy enough to be on there.

The other day, after browsing the market a bit, I decided to check up on my wormhole PI ventures. I had noticed that my launch pads were filling up slowly and it was time to go and empty them.

Good thing that the entrance to our WH was marked about 7 jumps from where I was. That meant I didn’t have to do too many jumps in my trusty little Nemesis.

After getting in the wormhole and checking if nobody else was around I stored my Nemesis in the corps’ ship bay and took out one of our Epithals. When I cleared the second POCO I suddenly noticed an Abaddon on D-scan, I figured he’d be looking for me in the POCO’s so I jumped around a bit and cleared the last one.

Once that was done I quickly went back to the POS and took out my trusty Nemesis, warped to a safe, cloaked up and told my other corps members that there was an Abaddon in our hole. One of them was gas mining in a venture a few holes from ours and told me to search for him while he slowly made his way back.

As most of you know by now, I’m not that good at pinpointing, anyone, and I figured that the Abaddon knew I switched into a bomber so he must be jumping around himself, I didn’t want to take combat probes out so decided that it was time for me to try out the D-scan way of pinpointing someone.

Let’s just say that I failed miserably, in the half our of jumping around, readjusting the angle etc etc I did not find anything, yet he was still there. Once my fellow corporation member came in the hole in his Manticore, it didn’t take too long to find him. Turns out he was taking sleepers on in one of the sites. One of the places that I forgot about. Oh well, time for a strategy.

We were both pretty much newbies when it comes to bombing, but we figured we could try and kill him with bombs + torpedoes. Seeing that our hole doesn’t like armor tanks.

I slow boated my way to one side, the other one to the other and we waited at 30km for him to take somewhat of a beating. While waiting another one of our corp came online and we told him to come over, he wanted to try out something new so made a ship and was coming our way.

That tiny speck right there, is my target!

As he was two jumps from our hole, I suddenly see a Sabre on D-scan.. Warping exactly on the Abaddon, at first I thought it was a friendly of him, up until the point that he put up a bubble. A second after the bubble was up, three Proteus’ de-cloaked in it.

Well, that guy’s thinking: “Oh shit”

I was just staring there instead of acting, while my corps member had already de-cloaked and fired his bomb, a second after I did the same, we figured we might as well try and get in on the kill mail.

My bomb came in too late, and I have absolutely no idea how much damage I did to them but it was a pretty fun experience.

“Where did they come from?!”

It was quite a thrill too, to suddenly see T3’s uncloak on our target.

I went back there as they were slowly going out of the bubble and my corps mate did so too, we had decided to see if we could bomb the Sabre as they were still in the bubble, so about half a second after stating that, my corps member decloaks, fires a bomb and… Explodes.

I couldn’t help but laugh, turns out one of the sleeper turrets got him, his bomb didn’t even come close to hitting anything.

The guys that took the kill talked in local, asking us if those bombs were meant for them. Because if they were, they didn’t actually do much.. But all we really wanted was to get in on the kill mail, and maybe blow up that Sabre.

I didn’t get any kills yet this weekend, but at least I didn’t lose any wrecks either, and it was pretty fun.. I might go roam later this evening, I still want to explode things.

The best way to learn new things, is by doing them. You will not learn how to draw by reading about it, nor will you learn how to set up a Hyper-V server environment with multiple Virtual Machines in it and a full Active Directory structure by reading about it either.

But it helps.

Seeing that my corps is at war, and my first plan on taking out my Machariel and Noctis team went down the drain. I decided to go out to Low and Null sec with my Nemesis, in search of prey.

Let’s just say that I would not be a very good predator. The most I saw in local was 10 people, and I couldn’t find them anywhere. When I jumped to null I came across a few people talking in chat, and after a few jumps I found them parked outside a bubble in between two gates, but three against one isn’t what I would call good odds, nor would my bomb do more than maybe, just maybe scratch their paint. So I decided that would not be a good idea to try.

Oh hello there, what are you doing?

But I never shot a bomb, and I wanted to learn how they work, so I needed to find a spot to try it out on. After a few more jumps I came into a system with an ice belt. People love ice!After jumping there, I saw a Skiff warp away, he must have seen me in local and figured I would be there to kill him, must be.. But I was in the belt, and I desperately wanted to shoot a bomb. So I lined up with one of the ice rocks, uncloaked, and watched my pretty bomb fly there.

Oh shit oh shit, get out!

Which, according to most people, was more than likely my fifth mistake of the day.

After reading so much about bombing, I decided to forget everything in the “heat of the moment”. Due to me being impatient I just dropped it and kept looking. It will come to no surprise then, that I got hit by my own bomb, luckily, I survived. But only barely, it was right around the time that it exploded that I had decided to warp away. Leaving me there with my hull barely intact.

At least I learned something, and I did it by doing.

Later that evening I was told about the corp’s wormhole about to close. Having never seen a wormhole close, I decided that I wanted to see it happen, so I took the jumps to the high sec static, went inside and waited on the other side. Snuggling up in my pod and looking at the hole with my cloak on.

If I were high, I would have been staring at this for ages

While waiting for the high sec static to close, we were talking in corporation chat. A call went out for having the “balls” to go out to high and get back in. Seeing that the hole were to collapse any minute, and a bet was made.

I’m still not sure why, but said bet unleashed a little game of double your ISK. We hyper multiplied it, starting with 1isk, and then going 2,4,8,16,… unfortunately I had to call it at 128. I did not have the 402m that I could send to my fellow corps member. Probably a good thing because I doubt that he was able to go to 103billion.

It was a pretty fun Sunday, not only did I fly out in low, I hung out in a wormhole, watching it shimmer and everything. I do think we scared a newbie though. As we were talking there was a flash of the wormhole. And before I knew it there was a bubble up.

Oh gods! Something just blew up in my face!

That even made me jump for a bit because I did not see that coming. Said Cormorant had de-cloaked and probably did not think that would happen either because before you could say “Booh!” the wormhole flashed again.

Then again, if I see a Nemesis, Legion and an Onyx suddenly pop up, I’d be getting out too.

After the Cormorant left, one of us came back in a Myrmidon, you know, just in case. And I said something about not knowing how to bomb, so they told me how to do a run, and try it out on the Myrmidon

I didn’t even scratch the paint

I learned quite a bit today, and it was fun.

I didn’t see the wormhole close though, as I had to work in the morning, I decided to head back out to my high sec HQ. As soon as I docked there, I heard about the hole closing, and it was wonderful.

Seeing that I have a bunch of extra ISK, without any effort or time spent on getting it, I decided to use it on ships and training myself in the use of bombing. Today will be a day for experimentation with that.

I currently have 10 fit Nemesis’ ready for action. Why the Nemesis? Well because I think it’s pretty, that’s the only reason behind my train of thought in picking a bomber.

Pretty, pretty Nemesis; Did I mention I like image search?

If I’m going to blow stuff up, or die trying, I might as well be doing it while looking at a pretty ship.

Besides figuring out how to bomb I also have to do the somewhat “boring” job of restocking my planets. It’s one of those things I tend to put off for quite a bit, most of the time my planets aren’t even working at full capacity because I don’t like stocking them again.

Which is one of the reasons why I might just go back to low sec with them soon. That would mean I could just log in, put the timers on, which would take about 5 minutes, and not bother for a while again.

Now, back to bombing. One of the reasons why I want to do this, is so that I will learn to not be afraid of low and null sec, specifically null, seeing that you can’t bomb in low. I’ve been going out of my way to not get into the lower security space, because I’m afraid of losing ships. And this has got to end.

In the larger picture I’m even considering of joining a WH corps, just because I need to learn new things and not get stuck in my ways.